John Carmack Speaks on Doom 3

The id programmer reveals a few small details about the game in a talk at E3.

id Software programmer John Carmack gave a fairly lengthy Q&A session in a private room at E3 today, and we sat in to see what the famous mind behind Doom and Quake had to say. Carmack's talk focused mostly on matters of technical interest, though he did let a few new details slip about id's current project, Doom 3.

When asked about the considerable quality and realism of Doom 3's graphics and how the id team is making the game's character animation consistently realistic, Carmack said that for the game's human characters, the team has decided that motion capture is the most appropriate technique. The game's monsters will pretty much all be animated by hand, but the humans--most of whom you'll encounter in the early part of the game, before the portal to hell is opened--will use motion data to enhance the realism of their movements.

Carmack said that the team is debating the way that Doom 3's save system will work. He didn't give any specific clues but said that it may be significantly different from what players have seen in previous id games. Given that in past games you were allowed to save anywhere, perhaps the company is considering a between-missions limitation for saving in the new game. When asked how long the game would be, Carmack wouldn't commit to a specific length but said that he favors the recent trend in the game industry toward shorter games with richer, deeper content packed into the duration.

Finally, Carmack said that scaling Doom 3's resolution will be the preferred way to increase performance without sacrificing graphical effects. It's undecided whether he'll allow players to turn shadowing on or off, since the shadows are essential in many of the game's dramatic scenes. Since the shadowing accounts for about half of the game's rendering time, though, he said he'll probably include the option. Stay tuned for more on Doom 3 as soon as we hear it.